CITY OF FIRE

Set in an alternate 1941 in which there’s no world war and humans share the world with hordes of imps, trolls, shapechangers, gods and every other type of creature that Yep can conjure from world mythology, this opener to a planned City Trilogy pits a squad of unlikely allies against bad guys with a shadowy but ominous agenda.

Banding together after surviving an evil dragon’s smash-and-grab theft of an ancient artifact from a San Francisco museum, young orphan Leech joins belligerent preteen aristocrat Scirye, along with Bayang (a dragon in disguise) and two other nonhuman sidekicks in a long chase to Hawaii—where, with help from the volcano goddess Pele, they barely escape a tsunami-sized trap as the villains wing away with a second artifact. The chase goes on, heading for the icy North.

The author’s consistent habit of freezing attacks for exchanges of threats or banter turns most of the action scenes into leisurely set pieces, but such scenes follow one another in quick succession in this plot-driven tale, and the cast is as engaging as it is diverse.